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It is difficult to find a critic of Othello who has a harsh word for Desdemona. We become increasingly accustomed to the deflating of the idealistic view of the tragic heroes; but the heroines—particularly Desdemona—have not as yet come under that colder scrutiny. The heroines seem inviolable, and Shakespeare abets our apparently ingrained desires that good women be innocent. Curiously enough, however, there are hints even in our traditional picture of Desdemona that something may be amiss. Bradley puts the traditional picture very simply:
She appears passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world.1
But Bradley touches on something potentially negative in Desdemona:
In Desdemona's place, Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about the lost handkerchief, would not have denied its loss.… In the same way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the peculiar beauty of her nature.2
The “something which” that Bradley is reluctant to approach is a sense of guilt. This is, however, a passing comment in Bradley's essay. It reveals, nonetheless, the shadow of doubt about Desdemona's nature. In a recent essay, “Idolatrous Love: A New Approach to Othello,” 3 R. N. Hallstead makes an unequivocal point about Desdemona's “carnality”—and indeed